Stuff

Text by Claire Baiz

While I discuss the relative merits of a tile sample, my husband tilts his head and gazes, puppy-like, past my shoulder. I get it. He wants to go outside. Well, Buddy, not until I get some cogent feedback.

Helena’s Precious Dinosaur

Text by Claire Baiz

“Yes. I was there.” Frieda Fligelman forced a smile. She said it again, softer the second time. “Now, let’s talk about something else.”

I was eighteen, she was eighty-five. Fligelman was treating me to lunch upstairs at the historic Montana Club, a block off Helena’s Last Chance Gulch. She refused to say what she witnessed in Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in October 1918.

Though we met several more times, I never pried. Was there a lost love in Prague? Perhaps, after fifty-seven years, she was still overcome by World War I, the

Text by Claire Baiz

It’s been less than twenty-four hours since Josh Parocai got out of the Cascade County Detention Center, and he’s sweating it out with a heavy implement dealer, a retired lawyer, a senior airman, and the Director of Development at the University of Great Falls.

Half of them have their shirts off. For a few, it ain’t pretty.

By 12:30, sixteen players have joined Parocai on the basketball court at the Great Falls Rec Center, 801 2nd Avenue North. There are four black guys, at least two Native Americans, a handsome dark skinned blue-eyed guy, a spectrum of Christians and Agnostics, a second-generation American Muslim, and a woman. Their ages range from 20 to 66.

“It’s the best pickup game in town,” says Kylie Diedrich, a former UGF Lady Argo. Diedrich is just another player—except, in a game of shirts and skins, you can be pretty sure which team she’s on.

Text by Claire Baiz

I couldn’t bear to carry our Encyclopedia Britannica to the dumpster. I made my husband do it.

We waited for a sunny Saturday to shlep four cardboard boxes to a flat spot beside our stinky, shoulder-high garbage bin. Every few hours, I peeked through a hole in our fence to see if they were still there.

Tom and I are downsizing. We figured it was a longshot, that someone would troll our alley for obsolete leather-bound reference books. We were desperate.

When it comes to electing this nation’s leaders, it’s not about substance. It’s about ‘spin.’ If you’re like me, you’re already dizzy. Protracted campaigns should be declared unconstitutional: this is cruel and unusual punishment for candidates and voters.

If it’s so painful for all the participants, why do we endure it? Listen close: that isn’t the Liberty Bell—it’s the ringing of cash registers, the ka-CHING of campaign spending and influence peddling. November is a long way off, and we have, for months, been plastered with partisan promises, threats and accusations